


deuil rose verte

by kormantic



Category: W. Somerset Maughm - The Razor's Edge
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-20
Updated: 2014-12-20
Packaged: 2018-03-02 12:27:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2811986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kormantic/pseuds/kormantic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I can still see that skinny little girl with the bow in her hair and her serious face whose voice trembled with tears when she read that ode of Keats's because it was so beautiful. I wonder where she is now." - Larry, The Razor's Edge</p>
            </blockquote>





	deuil rose verte

**Author's Note:**

  * For [finch (afinch)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/afinch/gifts).



The book was delivered promptly, which was unsurprising. Sophie read the inscription on the fly page.

_Mignonne…_

She knew the reference, reciting to herself:

_So if you hear me, Sweetheart,_  
 _while your age flowers_  
 _in its greenest newness,_  
 _gather, gather your youth._

“That little stuffed shirt,” she chuckled, drawing heavily on the resin-stained glass pipe. A presumptuous little prohibitionist, too, she’d have bet, except she knew he was English, and had only just stood him a drink herself. Just as much of a prig as those damned Puritans back at home, in the end, though. Moralizing with Ronsard!

Idly, she scratched a painted nail along the spine of an edition of Rimbaud set on the shabby nightstand. God help them both, there was little enough moralizing in the inciting words of a slutty little backdoor boy. She opened the book at random and set her eyes on the page:

_The swaying motion on the bank of the river falls,_  
 _The chasm at the sternpost,_  
 _The swiftness of the hand-rail,_  
 _The huge passing of the current_  
 _Conduct by unimaginable lights_  
 _And chemical newness_

Yes. Motion. Motion over memory, that was what she craved. The raw obliteration of a man’s sweating shoulder against her teeth, the thrill of him robbing her of thought, leaving her empty and longing again after only a moment’s peace. 

All this poetry was making her mawkish, but even so she couldn’t help but think of another line:

_Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue_  
 _Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;_  
 _His soul shall taste the sadness of her might..._

Fucking Keats. That odious little windbag. Her mouth was crooked with a savage little grin, considering Joy’s grape bursting under Anton’s strenuous tongue. 

Still. Keats had moved her once, when she’d been a child, reading aloud to a sweet, serious boy in the shade of a tree. 

_Gather, gather your youth..._

*

“But they printed it in the paper. He’s a decorated veteran, and he’s still against the war!”

Larry was quiet, but then he usually was.

“We read his poems-- _lads go West with sobs and curses, and sullen faces white as chalk_ \--don’t they frighten you?”

He shifted one shoulder and touched her hand lightly.

“Read it to me. It may be as he can convince me not to go.”

Nodding earnestly, she bent her head and read aloud:

“I am making this statement as an act of willful defiance of military authority because I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it… I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops and I can no longer be a party to prolonging these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust… I believe it may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share and which they have not enough imagination to realize.”

She was panting a little, sure her nose was red, and he tapped his knee against hers and then was still a while, his tanned, narrow wrists poking bony and too far out of the white cuffed shirt he’d grown out of over the summer, his long hands capping his grass-stained knees.

“I’m sorry, honey. Guess I must lack imagination, too,” he said at length. And then he smiled, slow and a little secretive.

She was the only one he’d told, aside from Dr. Nelson. She knew he’d be slipping away to Canada at almost any moment, and doing his best to join the airmen who were streaking across the skies like meteors, falling like stars.

“You’re a--a goddamned _fool_ ,” she sobbed. “You might have to go anyway, you don’t have to--you don’t have to _guarantee_ it.”

She felt his hand tweak her bow, stroke lightly down the colorless river of her hair.

“Hey now, those are pretty strong terms for a kid.”

“You’re only three years older than me! You’ll have to lie to get in!”

“And if I get in, I get to fly, you see?”

Sophie didn’t see, couldn't see anything past the curtain of her hair and the sting of tears. There had always been something transitory about Larry: he was like an eclipse racing across the brightness of the moon. A shadowy glimpse of something always just out of reach, rare and beautiful, but remote. She wasn’t surprised that he was leaving, only that she should react so strongly, weeping like the kid he’d sworn she was. He wanted to fly the way she wanted to write poems that spoke to people the way the works of Keats did, the way Sassoon and Wilfred Owen could be so frank with their fear, so vivid in their depictions of the horrors of war.

Larry took her hand solemnly, squeezed it gently, and then shook it like the gallant gentleman he might live to be one day.

“You should write me letters, you know. Isabel is terrible at remembering, and you’ll have to keep me up to date.”

She couldn’t look at him, but she nodded, trying to even her choked breathing.

“I will, Larry. I promise I will.”

*

Larry didn’t come back until well after the Armistice. He’d been recovering in a hospital in the French Alps, and he hadn’t wanted to worry anyone.

She read in the paper that Wilfred Owen had been killed in action on November 4, 1918 during the crossing of the Sambre-Oise Canal, exactly one week (almost to the hour) before the signing of the Armistice, that his mother had received the telegram informing her of his death on Armistice Day, as the church bells were ringing out in celebration. She came all over with a breast-deep and certain sensation that something exactly as picturesque and terrible had happened to Larry, and had skipped meals for two days obsessing over it, her limbs weak and heavy with dread.

*

But Larry did come back, with his arm in a sling, with polished buttons and a smart cap. He stopped at her door, with a leaner face and a deeper tan, with all her letters wrapped in wax paper and tied in a sloppy school-boy strap of black ribbon.

“These meant a lot to me, but I’m worried that I’ll lose them now that they’re not the only things I own aside from my shaving kit. Could you keep them for me, honey?”

She’d kept them at her parents’ house, in a sewing basket she’d tucked into the attic. Like as not that they were there, still. She thought it was funny that they should be, when the wedding album and the scrapbook for baby had been torn to pieces, flung out the window and into the street to provide what scant cushion they might--but then the orderly had been quick as a tiger, and as relentlessly strong.

 

_NO, no! go not to Lethe, neither twist_  
 _Wolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;_  
 _Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kist_  
 _By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;_  
 _Make not your rosary of yew-berries,_

_Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be_  
 _Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl_  
 _A partner in your sorrow's mysteries;_

_For shade to shade will come too drowsily,  
And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul._

**Author's Note:**

> Happy Yuletide, finch! I hope this fits your headcanon Sophie. 
> 
> Poems, in order of appearance: 
> 
> Mignonne, by Pierre de Ronsard
> 
> Motion, by Arthur Rimbaud
> 
> Ode on Melancholy, John Keats
> 
> How to Die, by Siegfried Sassoon
> 
> Extract from open letter to his commanding officer (and eventually the London Times), Siegfried Sassoon, July 1917 
> 
> Ode on Melancholy, John Keats


End file.
